29 August 2003

It is raining and thundering again out there. The morning is coming in with lightning and loud banging, another wave following the one that blew through in the night. We have been battered daily by massive electrical storms, the one that started the week knocking out the power across the National Capital Region. We aren't the only ones to get hit. London's power grid is stressed by the heatwave and it failed at rush hour last night. At least they are not wet. I looked at the forecast for Washington, and saw with dismay that we are supposed to get hit again tomorrow, and Sunday and Monday, right through the Labor Day weekend. And beyond, if the little thundercloud-and-lightning icons are to be believed.

It is the change of the season, and the cold winds of northern Canada are being gathered up in the jet stream and hurled against the humidity of the Chesapeake. Ka-blambo! Football and falling leaves cannot be far behind. I glanced at the headlines as the bacon fried and the coffee dripped. Another hostile-fire casualty in the mire of Iraq. North Korea vowing to test a nuclear weapon. Two thousand pages of radio transcripts from the World Trade Center released and all the horror of that lovely September morning boiling out again, the abscess refusing to heal. And person or persons unknown have detonated a massive bomb at the Tomb of Ali in an Najaf in the middle of Friday prayers. Only one of the bad guys could be so cold as to murder his co-religionists in the cause of a higher good, but I am completely confident that we will be blamed for this act of terror.

Today seems to mark one of those rising tides in human affairs. In 1991 the Soviet Parliament met in Moscow and spent an emotional three hours of debate on a matter of extreme gravity. In the end, it voted to suspend all activities of the Communist Party pending an investigation of its role in the attempted coup against the government of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. The suspension meant the end of the old regime and the ascendancy of the great patriot and drunk Boris Nickolaevich Yeltsin. The world that my generation knew was over and a new one was born. I don't know what Osama was doing that day. I know that the guys from the Agency who had assisted the Mujahadeen in their holy war against the Russians in Afghanistan were directed to leave them alone, even when they reported that the training camps were beginning to talk about a holy war with America.

There is a tide in my affairs as well, though I can't tell if it is rising or falling. The long goodbye takes a fairly dramatic step. I will turn in my parking pass to the executive garage at the Department and then stop by the Anacostia Naval Station and pick up a copy of my DD-214 form. It is an important paper. It documents military service and official release from active service in the Armed Forces of the United States of America.

I'm done with that, finally, but as usual there are a few loose ends. The President has authorized two new medals proposed by the Congress. One is for service in Korea, in the long cold war that followed the hot one. I did my fourteen month one year tour there, and the Land of the Morning Calm changed the course of my life. The other is for service in the Global War on Terrorism, the GWOT, in two orders, one for going and one for not going but being really in favor of the struggle.

I fall into the latter category, and old warrior with a gimp leg. The nice old woman who is working my DD-214 says she can't put them on the DD-214 without specific authorization.

"So what do I do?" I asked. "How do I ensure the record is complete?"

"Well," she said. "I suppose you could file a DD-215. That's how." I looked at her and realized slowly that I didn't care anymore. The medals might continue to drop out of the sky for years, showing up in the mail like the Cold War Victory Certificate. They say there will be a medal for that, too, but that the Department of Defense blanches at the expense of issuing one to everyone who served for fifty years.

And I realized I didn't really care anymore. I told the nice lady to just have the Chief sign the paper and put my record in the dead-letter file. I didn't go to the GWOT, after all, though as you know the GWOT wound up coming to us. And that too changed the course of my life. For a moment I thought I could make a difference in how our the Government could craft a public response to terrorism. I worked with those poor benighted fellows at the Pentagon who attempted to create a stream of public messages that would convince the Arab Street that we were only coming to root out a few bad guys. Our message was to be that the GWOT wasn't our equivalent of Jihad against all of them.

That effort was a miserable failure, broken on the rocks of bureaucratic infighting. Then I heard of another chance to contribute to the fight. I ate some time that would augment my precious pension and informed the Bureau of my intention to retire,. Then with the support of some old friends I connived a way to join the Department of Health and Human Services and stand on the ramparts of domestic response to terrorism. DHHS was chartered with the emergency response to bio-terror and mobilizing the first responders and the hospitals to handle mass casualties. I arrived the same day that the mission was devoured in the ravenous maw of the newly-established Department of Homeland Security. The new Department promptly gobbled up parts of 28 separate government organizations and has yet to digest any of them.

I was thinking about just how right it was to depart the Federal Service at this juncture in time. Perhaps it will be easier to make a contribution from outside, or perhaps is it just something too vast for me to do anything about as an individual. "No," I thought to myself. "You and your buddies did make a difference in the great struggle with global communism, because you went." Squish.

Squish.

Water flowed from the sides of the little oriental rug I have by the balcony door. It pooled on the top like a sponge. I shifted my feet. Squish. This was not good, I thought. The water was supposed to stay outside and this was the fifth floor. I hoped the water had not risen this far from the parking lot, global warming notwithstanding. The sheen of water began at the edge of the long air conditioning unit and stopped at the edge of my large oriental carpet which I realized with growing horror was acting as a wick, sucking the water through the millions of hand knots toward the back of my easy chair. It had probably been coming after me for days and I didn't know it.

It was like the ship, and I heard the words ring in my memory: "Flooding! Flooding! There is flooding in compartment Five-tack-five-one-five Bravo! Now away the in-port response team from Repair Locker Five!"

I ran to the bathroom in my best General Quarters manner. On the ship I might have banged my forehead on a steel overhead or tripped over the sill of a watertight hatch. I gathered all my towels and hurled them down on the sodden floor. I sloshed over to the offending air conditioner and turned it off- secured it, in Naval parlance. There is  an old joke about what the Services mean by that phrase. To a Marine it would mean surrounding the air conditioner with armed men. To the Air Force it would mean signing a long-term contractual agreement for the equipment. To me it just meant turning the damned thing off. I cursed whoever it was that had not done the preventative maintenance service on the equipment and tucked my trousers into my socks in case there was a flash fire. I  cycled the towels over the floor, soaking up water and throwing them out onto the balcony. Which suddenly reminded me of one of the catwalks- sponsons, we called them- that protruded from the skin of the ship and gave us access to the air.

There was water everywhere. When I had exhausted the battery of towels I found a large trash bag and stepped out onto the sponson to gather them up and lug them down to the ship's laundry for drying. Then I broke out the fans and opened the hatches to gain access to the air while the dryer cycled. This de-watering was going to be a challenge. It was still raining outside and the air was as moist without as within. Then I repeated the process, wishing there was someone in the galley to bring coffee and sandwiches. I peeled my thick oriental rugs back, propping the damp parts up on pieces of furniture so the moist air could circulate around the tops and bottom. I kept at it until the flooding was under control and secured from General Quarters. I fished in my pocket for a cigarette and realized the smoking lamp was not lit in all authorized spaces. On this ship we were only permitted ot smoke outside. I stepped gingerly over the damp industrial beige carpet and onto the gray paint of the sponson. I lit up a Lucky and looked down at the wave of traffic rushing past toward the shore of the city. I stubbed out the butt and realized I had to get moving.

I had urgent personal business ashore. I needed to get downtown and retire.

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra